Emile de Antonio's In the Year of the Pig (1968) is a comprehensive and riveting damnation of foreign entanglements in Vietnam. The ignorance and folly of the French and Americans is set out with deeply-researched, hard-won archival footage, devastating interviews, and unusual soundtrack choices. Were the thuwp-thuwps of helicopters on the soundtrack, for example, an influence on Coppola's Apocalypse Now? Visual images, of protesting monks (top) and hooded prisoners (bottom) in In the Year of the Pig foreshadow those from Burma (as in the documentary Burma VJ) and from the Abu Ghraib prison.
